Saturday, November 14, 2015

Travelling the circumference of the truly gigantic Pacific, Simon
Winchester tells the story of the world's largest body of water, and -
in matters economic, political and military - the ocean of the future.

The Pacific is a world of tsunamis and Magellan, of the Bounty mutiny
and the Boeing Company.

It is the stuff of the towering Captain Cook and
his wide-ranging network of exploring voyages, Robert Louis Stevenson
and Admiral Halsey.

It is the place of Paul Gauguin and the explosion of
the largest-ever American atomic bomb, on Bikini atoll, in 1951.

It has
an astonishing recent past, an uncertain present and a hugely important
future.

The ocean and its peoples are the new lifeblood, fizz and
thrill of America - which draws so many of its minds and so much of its
manners from the sea - while the inexorable rise of the ancient center
of the world, China, is a fixating fascination.

The presence of rogue
states - North Korea most notoriously today - suggest that the focus of
the responsible world is shifting away from the conventional post-war
obsessions with Europe and the Middle East, and towards a new set of
urgencies.

Navigating the newly evolving patterns of commerce and
trade, the world's most violent weather and the fascinating histories,
problems and potentials of the many Pacific states, Simon Winchester's
thrilling journey is a grand depiction of the future ocean.

Simon Winchester argues that our destiny will be dictated by the Pacific’s vast expanses

Will
the Pacific save us?
In his biography of an ocean, Simon Winchester
finds an optimistic note among all the doom we humans trail in our wake.
This enormous body of water, which covers roughly a third of the
planet’s surface, has become a cistern for our western sins.
We have
raided its indigenous peoples and animals; our world wars and nuclear
tests have contaminated its islands and seas.
How does it repay us?
By
absorbing the heat caused by our excessive burning of fossil fuels,
acting as a “gigantic safety valve” to global warming.
Archipelagos may
be overwhelmed and coral reefs die,
but in the end, Winchester intimates, the Earth will survive because of
“the dominant entity on the planet” – all 64 million square miles of
it.

As a companion to his magisterial Atlantic, Winchester’s Pacific is an equally digressive book, worthy of Herman Melville, and full of wondrous anecdotes that would fuel an entire series of QI.
Sikh guards were employed by the British to guard their colonial
armouries because their religion forbade smoking.
Newly discovered
deep-sea vents, where life itself may have begun, recycle all of the
planet’s oceanic water every 10 years.
All of the continents could fit
into this one ocean.
To encompass this vastness in one book, Winchester selects a series
of key moments in the Pacific’s recent history.
He starts in 1950 with a
bravura chapter, The Great Thermonuclear Sea.
It is not a pretty story.
Places recently ravaged by bloody war faced a new outrage: the multiple
detonation of atomic bombs.
Far from the Berlin Wall, the cold war was
rehearsed in blood-warm seas. Islands, and islanders’ bodies, became
test sites for the apocalypse.
One explosion was witnessed by a reporter
from the New York Times.
“It was like watching the birth and
death of a star, born and disintegrated in the instant of its birth...
it lighted up the sky and ocean with the light of many suns, a light not of the earth”.

Not all of Pacific’s scenes are so dark.
A scintillating
chapter on the transition of surfing from Hawaii to California in 1907,
courtesy of a half-Hawaiian, half-Irish surfer named George Freeth,
hymns the “erotic, arching elegance” of this democratic use of the sea.
We follow the birth of the Sony Corporation in Japan and the sacking of
Gough Whitlam in Australia, both tectonic shifts in the cultural rise of
the Pacific Rim.
Western interests fall, with the symbolic sinking
(probably due to sabotage) of the Queen Elizabeth in Hong Kong’s
harbour; Prince Charles sails over its wreck in 1997 as he and the
British leave the colony to new rulers described by the prince as
“appalling old waxworks”.

But the greatest power of the Pacific is elemental.
It is where our weather is born, and in a brilliant chapter on El Niño
and climate change, Winchester shows that the placid ocean is becoming
steadily more stormy, wreaking indiscriminate havoc from the Philippines
to Australia.
At the same time, those waters have become witness to “a
sudden and wholesale redistribution of world power”, from America to
China.
Far from running scared at the notion, Winchester wonders if it
might not actually be a good thing if we were to allow the east its
turn, rather than falling back on our old notions of racial superiority.
The Pacific is our future ocean.
And in this provocative, elegant book,
it has found a new and lucid storyteller.